Cost by Roxana Robinson
Release date: 2008 / 420 pages
Synopsis (from front cover): “When Julia Lambert, a painter and art professor, settles into her old Maine farmhouse
for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fraglie relationships with her father, an authoritarian neuro-surgeon, and her gentle-hearted mother, who is quietly losing her memory. Into their insular world a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia learns that her twenty-two-year-old son, Jack, has spiraled into heroin addiction.”
First line: Her memory was gone.
Review: This novel is so powerful I not only carried it with me everywhere while I was reading it, but then proceded to recommend it to everyone I saw through the course of those few days. I did not know the subject beforehand, thankfully, and can’t imagine I would have been drawn to this topic. On the other hand, the journey is so harrowing that I did tell my fellow readers the basic premise as perhaps a warning — or at least to prepare them.
But if you do choose to read the synopsis above, please know that this novel is about so much more. Robinson deftly moves through the consciousness of each family member as she tells the story of this family. Somehow, each character has a unique, unmistakable voice and we can’t help but be drawn to even the most difficult, unbending characters. The primary narrator is probably Julia — the mother — and she is very, very likable, but every character shines in their own right.
Beyond the narration and quicksilver pace of the story, the perspectives are so well-written, and so heart-rendingly beautiful, devastating and intuitive. I can’t say I was sorry when the novel ended since there was such a satisfying, appropriate sense of closure, (and the journey was harrowing), but I was very sorry to not be reading Robinson any more. The magical resonance of her prose is elusive — she does not use unusual diction or arrange words or sentences in any overtly unexpected ways, but somehow her writing snaked its way into my soul.
Here is a passage that describes grief better than any other I’ve found yet:
All that fall and winter, when Julia woke in the mornings she was already exhausted, the day lay ahead, insuperable. She felt as though she were trying to move something enormous up a mountain. All day long she struggled to shift its monstrous weight; by the end she had the sense that she’d moved it slightly. She ever got it where it should be, and in the morning there it was again, the massive, inert presence, the steep looming mountain.
So, I definitely recommend this — tough and terrifying at times, but so worth it.
You hve convinced me to read this book. On my TBR list! Happy New Year of reading!
I’m so glad — well worth reading!! Happy New Year to you, too!
I had heard about this one earlier in the year but somehow it fell of my radar. Now it is on my TBR list. Thanks for a wonderful review.